Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.

Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents. | TechCrunch

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Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.

The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. The raise comes after the company signed up over 40,000 developers and grew its revenue 10x in just four months, it says.

Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the app funeral, held in San Francisco on September 17, was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. It also included an actual coffin for app icons.

The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end. Honestly, its going to take a while, but I think, directionally, its inevitable, he said of the shift from apps to agents.

The thesis behind the startup, as you may have guessed, is that users no longer want to install new apps. Instead, they want access to agents that work through the messaging apps they already use, like iMessage and WhatsApp.

Metas Muse, whose app has soared to No. 1 on the app stores, is putting that theory to the test. But even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, Tian sees a market for serving developers who want their applications to work over messaging services. Thats why Photon is offering a package of tools, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite. Combined, they allow developers to build and operate an agent experience that works over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and more.

The idea for Photon emerged from the time co-founders Tian and Ryan Zhu, the CTO, spent building consumer apps as students, often at hackathons. Every time they finished a new app, they hit the same bottleneck: getting people to discover it. By building an agent that worked within iMessage, they realized they could reach people through an app those people already use every day: Apples Messages.

Tian, for instance, had built a bot that would text his friends back as him over iMessage. When he and Zhu made the technology open source on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it. So they went all in. Tian dropped out of UPenns M&T program, and Zhu left high school, later becoming a visiting student at MITs Media Lab.

Today, the open source version of Photon still accounts for 98% of its use.

This April, the founders decided to create a managed platform and sell access to it via subscription tiers. This hosted version of the product offers 99.95% uptime, which is much higher than what youd get if you were just running the open source version on your local Mac for a hobby project. Its also SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-compliant, which opens the door to healthcare agent use cases.

To date, the startups platform has attracted over 40,000 developer sign-ups and now includes paying clients. (Any usage beyond 10 users requires moving out of the free tier to one of the three paid tiers, were told.) The company isnt sharing revenue figures but said that, in addition to the 10x revenue growth, its seeing less than 3% churn, and its messaging volume has grown by 5x in the last month alone.

Customers using Photon include Corgi Insurance; social introductions app Boardy; Gen Z dating platform Ditto; business banking platform Rho; finance AI assistant Fliptexts; AI email client Slashy; and others building agents for fintech, consumer AI, and other vertical use cases.

Photons technology integration partners also include companies such as Vercel (Eve and ChatSDK) and Nous Research, whose Hermes agent uses Photon as its default iMessage layer. Photon is also the layer under Tencents QClaw and NanoClaw. Plus, Photon has seen framework and infra integrations across LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, and Telnyx, among others.

Vercel is also one of Photons new backers. The startups seed round was co-led by Gradient and A* with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.

Across both the hosted and open source versions, the technology reaches millions of end users, Tian estimated.

While today, Photon focuses on agents connecting with humans, Tian believes theres potential to grow into an expanding market that involves connecting agents to other agents.

I think, in the future, agents will be able to find you the agent that can do the right things so its going to be the A-to-A communication layer, Tian said. For instance, if a person was chatting with their AI assistant making travel plans, the agent could pull in other agents when needed, like a flight-booking agent or hotel-booking agent. Its been pretty powerful to observe the whole A-to-A-to-P [agent-to-agent-to-person] space, he added.

AI, AI agents, Photon, Startups, TC

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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

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